Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Thoreau illustrates certain American traits connected with lonelinessin an extreme and exaggerated form. He finally lost his battle—the typicalAmerican battle of trying to convert a loneliness into an enriched and fruitfulsolitude—but before he died (at forty-four, murmuring: “It is better somethings should end”), he furnished us many a bulletin of the struggle, manyan insight, and many an aid.Another of the most famous pages in American literature is thatwherein Thoreau gives his reasons for going to live in solitude at WaldenPond.I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to frontonly the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what I hadto teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.…nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it were quite necessary.… if [life] … proved to be mean, why then to get the whole andgenuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or ifit were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a trueaccount of it in my next excursion.Thoreau’s books are a sort of cento of transcriptions and amplificationsof entries in his journal. Here is what he wrote on the third day of hisresidence at the pond (6 July 1845):“I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts, which are the phenomenaor actuality which the gods meant to show us—face to face, and soI came here. Life! who knows what it is, what it does?”There are several things to notice about these passages: among them,first, that he will put his question as though no one had ever said anythingvaluable before; and, second, that in order to ask what life is, it is necessaryto remove oneself from the human community.Americans constantly feel that the whole world’s thinking has to bedone over again. They did not only leave the Old World, they repudiated it.Americans start from scratch. This is revolt indeed. All authority is suspect.And this is boundless presumption. I quoted Whitman’s words in our lastsession (“It almost seems as if a poetry … suitable to the human soul werenever possible before”). Poe, clutching some mathematics and physics hehad acquired during a brief stay at West Point, launched into a descriptionof how the universe came into being, and deduced the nature of God fromhis theory of the galaxies. He called his work Eureka and did not leave us indoubt that he felt that he had succeeded where the greatest minds had failed.Professional astronomers dismiss it with a smile, but we notice that the great209